Galactic Prospectors 1.004.023
You can get out of the pilot seat now.
Your ship has an inside. Not a menu, not a loading screen into some generic room: the actual floor plan of the hull you are flying, built from its own silhouette, which you can walk around while the ship is still out there in the belt. Every ship in the game has one. So does the ugly kitbashed thing you welded together last week.
That is the headline, but it is not the half of it. Stations got a police force. Pirates learned to board them. And multiplayer got torn out and rebuilt.
Walk around your own ship
Stand up mid flight and the game does not cut away anywhere. The deck is drawn right into the world, turning with the hull, while you are still moving.
Once you are down there, the deck is yours to fill. Bolt a refinery into the hold so you can process ore without docking. Put a bunk aft. Fit a cryopod amidships. It stays with the ship.
The catch is that all of it can break. A hull is not just a stat line any more, it is the kit bolted to its deck, and kit takes damage. A cracked refinery is a cracked refinery until somebody welds it.
You can board other players, too. Ask to come aboard and you get their deck, their fittings, the exact state of their gear. You are walking around the ship they actually built, not a stand in.
Two smaller things you will notice down there: your character holds real tools now instead of the four coloured lines a rifle and a welder used to share, and there are emotes.
Stations will remember what you did
A trading post used to be the one safe place in the game. Nothing could go wrong. That was boring, so it is gone.
Shoot a crew member and the nearest guards stop what they are doing and come for you. If they get you, the cuffs go on, you lose control of where you walk, and you get dragged to a cell. Flying off and coming back later does not help. The station writes it down and keeps it with the world.
It cuts both ways. Pirates now raid friendly outposts, and the crew fight back.
When nobody is shooting, stations feel less like a corridor with people in it. Crew have actual work. You can weld a station's broken fittings, grind the ones you do not want into scrap, and put things back where you found them. Cantinas serve drinks. There is a jukebox, and you can paste a link into it and hear it in the game.
Keycards make sense now, too. A card opens the site it was cut for, and nothing else, so finding one actually means something.
And the radiation in derelicts is a real hazard your suit can answer, rather than an orange square that quietly ate your health.
Multiplayer got rebuilt, and is no longer experimental
The old netcode is gone. All of it. What replaced it is smaller, faster, and it covers the parts of the game multiplayer used to quietly skip. Multiplayer is now in an official state and no longer experimental.
Other players move properly now. No more rubber banding while the game chases their last known position.
Join a session in progress and you get the session, not a blank one. The bounty that is already running. The packs somebody dropped an hour ago. The map pins. Previously you only saw things that happened after you walked in.
Custom hulls travel with the sprite that draws them, so your kitbash looks right on everyone's screen instead of turning into a question mark.
Also new: spawn protection so you are not target practice in your first minutes in a world, rules for what your guns are allowed to hit so a nine barrel broadside stops at the asteroid instead of carrying on into your own hauler, kick and ban tools that carry the reason you typed, and country flags in the server browser worked out from the actual address rather than whatever the host claimed.
Mods, and the tools to make them
Workshop browsing moved into the game where it belongs. Installed mods on the left, this world's mods on the right in load order, drag to reorder. Joining a modded server shows you what is downloading instead of a frozen screen.
Publishing happens in game as well. Name, description, visibility and thumbnail, all set at upload.
The bigger news is that the tools we build content with now ship to you:
- Animation Creator. Drag the character where you want it. That is the pose. No rigging degree required.
- Block Builder. Draw a shape, give it a picture and a few numbers, and it is something you can build with.
- Particle Builder. Build an effect and watch it play on the game's own runtime. Drop in an animated GIF and it becomes particle art.
Scripting reaches the real systems now, not a sandbox with the interesting parts removed. There is a sample mod to start from.
Art and effects
Most of the game's art was redone or reprocessed for this update. Ships, stations, ores, ingots, the interface, all of it.
There is a proper particle system behind it, and effects work inside interiors as well as out in space. Modders can add their own.
The ship page also knows what kind of ship you are flying now, worked out from the hull itself, instead of the three names it used to recognise.
Interface
The mouse pointer is an astronaut's glove in your own suit colours, and it points at whatever you are hovering. You can resize it or turn it off.
The sector readout at the top of the screen doubles as your notifications. When something happens it swells into the message, then settles back.
Fixes
- The pointer used to hide behind drop down menus. Every menu now draws inside the game window, and the pointer sits on top of all of them.
- The Settings panel changed size every time you switched tabs. It does not any more.
- Removed the confusing footnote under the account panel's "do not show this again" box.
- Old saves from earlier versions import cleanly.
- Steam status messages can be translated.
For server admins
The RCON tool ships inside the game and the dedicated server, on Windows and Linux. It was crashing a lot. It is not any more.
- Editing a saved server no longer closes the tool. This was eight out of every ten crashes.
- Neither does deleting your last saved server.
- Double clicking a server while Steam is signing you in no longer opens two connections.
- Typing an address with the port in it tells you it cannot connect, instead of falling over.
- A read only settings file reports the problem and carries on.
Server config handling on the native server build got another pass as well.